There are increasing social and economic pressures to develop renewable energy sources as well as renewable and biodegradable industrial and consumer products and materials. The catalytic conversion of natural feedstocks to value-added products has resulted in new approaches and technologies whose application spans across the traditional economic sectors. There is a new focus on biorefining, which can be described as the processing of agricultural and forestry feedstocks capturing increased value by processing them into multiple products including platform chemicals, fuels, and consumer products. The conversion of tallow and other organic oils to biodiesel has been previously studied in depth. Traditionally, this conversion involves the trans-esterification of the triglyceride to produce three methyl-esterified fatty acids and a free glycerol molecule. The chemical, rheological, and combustion properties of the resulting “biodiesel” have also been extensively investigated. Unfortunately, these methyl-ester based fuels have been shown to be far more susceptible to oxidation and have lower heating values than the traditional petroleum based diesel fuels. As a result the traditional biodiesels must be blended with existing diesel stock and may also have to be supplemented with antioxidants to prolong storage life and avoid deposit formation in tanks, fuel systems, and filters.
The pyrolysis of fatty acids is one approach to producing the corresponding alkanes and alkenes useful as solvents and fuels. However, fatty of various chain lengths are formed as part of the pyrolysis products as well as unreacted feedstock. The presence of the fatty acids are undesirable for the applications listed above if they are to meet industry and regulatory standards. They must therefore be removed in order to be useful as hydrocarbon solvents and fuels.